Thomas Jones on thriller writer Eric Ambler | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close For Graham Greene he was "unquestionably our best thriller writer". John le Carré once called him "the source on which we all draw". With the six novels he wrote in the years leading up to the second world war - five of which have just been reissued by Penguin Modern Classics - Eric Ambler revitalised the British thriller, rescuing the genre from the jingoistic clutches of third-rate imitators of John Buchan, and recasting it in a more realist, nuanced and leftishly intelligent - not to mention exciting - mould. His novels were all out of print by the time he died in October 1998, but his tales of ordinary men and (sometimes) women caught up in the machinations of carelessly malign international corporations, or of stateless refugees facing an uncertain future in a volatile and unwelcoming Europe, seemed anything but out of date when I first read them the following year - the year in which Naomi Klein's No Logo brought concerns about the depredations of globalised capital into the mainstream, and thousands of people were displaced by the war in Kosovo. However, Ambler never intended to be a thriller writer.

If his 1985 autobiography, the wrily entitled Here Lies Eric Ambler, is to be believed, his ambition as a young man was to be a playwright. Born 100 years ago this month in south-east London, the eldest child of music-hall artists, he won at the age of 16 a scholarship to study engineering at Northampton Polytechnic in Islington (now City University). He soon dropped out, and after the general strike found a job as a trainee at the Edison Swan Electric Company. During a six-month secondment to the firm's cable works in Gloucestershire, he wrote the first two chapters of a realist novel, in the manner of Arnold Bennett, based on the life of his father. Returning to London, he was asked to compose a press release extolling the bogus virtues of a batch of dodgy bulbs for car headlights. They sold so quickly on the back of it that the company even thought about making more. As for Ambler, the experience may or may not have given him a taste for concocting plausible fictions with a pseudo-technical bent, but it certainly showed he had a talent for it. Before long he was working full-time as an advertising copywriter.

Here Lies is almost coy in the way it slips mention of Ambler's first novel into the narrative: he gives his girlfriend a bound page proof in a cinema on King's Road, Chelsea, just before the lights go down. The Dark Frontier (1936) began life as a parody of the contemporary British thriller. The problem with the genre, as Ambler saw it, was principally one of character. Whether "power-crazed or coldly sane", the villains were wholly implausible, while the hero "could be a tweedy fellow with steel-grey eyes and gun pads on both shoulders or a moneyed dandy with a taste for adventure. He could also be a xenophobic ex-officer with a nasty antisemitic streak. None of that really mattered.

All he really needed to function as hero was abysmal stupidity combined with superhuman resourcefulness and unbreakable knuckle bones." Julian Symons, in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, framed it slightly differently: "After the first world war began, spy stories became unequivocally nationalist in tone and rightwing in political sympathy." In The Dark Frontier a mild-mannered academic is knocked on the head in a car accident shortly after picking up one of these novels in a West Country pub. He comes round convinced he is Conway Carruthers, secret agent, the thick-skulled, tough-knuckled hero of the book he's just been reading, and charges off to eastern Europe to thwart the nuclear ambitions of a power-crazed countess. It's extremely silly, but also, as if despite itself, a fairly decent thriller, not merely mocking but beginning to improve on the shortcomings of the form. That contemporary readers were prepared to take it at face value is perhaps a sign of how severe those shortcomings were. The Scotsman called it a "genuine thriller".

By the time reviews of The Dark Frontier were coming out, Ambler was already deep into his next book, a straight - or at least non-parodic - thriller with the working title Background to Danger. A short, fast-paced, intensely gripping novel, set over the course of a few days in November 1936, it was written during "the year in which Italy invaded Abyssinia, civil war broke out in Spain and Hitler ordered the German army to reoccupy the Rhineland," as Ambler says in Here Lies. "It was a year of yet more refugees and of marriages arranged to confer passports. It was also the year in which the League of Nations was at last seen plainly to be impotent. Those were the things that I was trying, in my own fictional terms, to write about." The protagonist of Uncommon Danger, as Hodder & Stoughton thought the novel should be called, is not a professional hero. Far from it. Kenton is a 30-year-old cash-strapped freelance journalist, based in Berlin, working for whichever London papers will use his stories. He "had never regarded himself as a particularly courageous man.

Such scenes of physical violence as he had encountered in his work had upset both his digestion and his mental processes." He's no good with his fists, missing his target the one time in the novel he tries to punch someone, and has never fired a gun before in his life. Most of the heroes of Ambler's subsequent novels are in the same mould: a journalist, a teacher or an engineer rather than a professional spy, short of money, not straightforwardly a member of any one nation-state (Kenton's father was from Belfast, his mother French), and slightly disreputable. Kenton is introduced as he waits in the cold at Nuremberg station in the middle of the night; he is trying to get to Vienna, because he's lost all his money and got into debt playing poker dice; there's a man in the Austrian capital, a Jew he helped to escape from Munich two years earlier, from whom he thinks he might be able to borrow money, although he'd really rather not have to ask. So when a fellow passenger offers him a substantial sum to smuggle an envelope over the frontier, he's all too willing to oblige. The story doesn't take long to get going.

"Kenton was one of those persons, of whom there are many, who find the contemplation of scenery very boring." And Ambler isn't one to waste time with gratuitous passages of description. Kenton soon finds himself not only wanted by the Austrian police for a murder he didn't commit, but up against a particularly vicious thug called Stefan Saridza and entangled in a plot to install a fascist government in Romania. The reader already knows more about this plot than Kenton does, because in the prologue we witness a gathering of the senior conspirators: a meeting of the board of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company in the City of London. The company, under the leadership of its loathsome chairman, Joseph Balterghen, wants greater access to the oilfields of Bessarabia (now Moldova), and sees regime change as a perfectly reasonable way to go about getting it - 70 years later, the scenario is all too grimly familiar. None of the board members makes an appearance in the main body of the narrative. "You see," one of the other characters explains to Kenton, "your businessman desires the end, but dislikes the means ... That is why Saridza is necessary.

For at some point or other in the amazingly complicated business structure of the world there is always dirty work to be done." This dark territory stalked by the likes of Saridza, the hinterland that Kenton stumbles into, between the secret decisions made in board-rooms and the global upheavals they effect, is ideal terrain for a thriller to explore. Kenton learns about Saridza from Andreas Zaleshoff, the Soviet Union's man in Switzerland. But Kenton's own views on the might of capital aren't so very different: "It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesmen, that shaped the destinies of nations," he reflects. In Uncommon Danger, the representatives of communism and what Zaleshoff calls "moderate radicalism" but Kenton himself would probably think of as basic human decency are pitted against the agents of capital and fascism: Balterghen, Saridza and their many cronies. There's no shortage of unsavoury foreigners in the novel, but they're more than matched by the unsavoury Englishmen. The most hateful character of all is Saridza's chief henchman, Captain Mailler.

Stupid, sadistic, public-school educated, a former Black and Tan and one-time professional strikebreaker in the United States, "wanted in New Orleans for the murder of a coloured woman", it's tempting to see him as a satirical portrait of the archetypal hero of the moribund thrillers that Ambler was so determined to supersede, unmasked and revealed for the cryptofascist brute he really is. Kenton's alliance with Zaleshoff isn't always an easy one - the journalist is unimpressed by the spy's attempt to fob him off with the official Stalinist line on Trotskyite subversion, for example, and Zaleshoff is, not unreasonably, suspicious of Kenton's motives for helping him - but it's kept afloat by the undercurrent of sexual attraction between Kenton and Zaleshoff's sister. Tamara Prokovna isn't the token love interest, however, or some kind of damsel in distress: she's a vital character in her own right, intrinsic to the main plot, not to mention extremely handy behind the wheel of a supercharged Mercedes.

From behind the keys of his supercharged typewriter, Ambler produced an astonishing four more novels in the next three years: Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear. Epitaph for a Spy is a sly variation on the traditional English country-house murder mystery - a crime has been committed; one of the guests must be guilty; the mystery has to be solved within a limited time frame - but displaced to a hotel on the French riviera, and with espionage the crime rather than murder. The narrator, Josef Vadassy, is an émigré Hungarian language teacher with an out-of-date Yugoslav passport. He was born in Szabadka, which the 1919 Treaty of Trianon transferred from Hungary to Yugoslavia (it's now known as Subotica, and is still in Serbia). While he was studying in Budapest, his father and brother were shot by the Yugoslav police for being social democrats. He has ricocheted around Europe, being thrown out of one country after another for not having his papers in order - an impossible demand - and is currently living and working in Paris.

"If France expelled me there was nowhere left for me to go." The threat of deportation - after a spell in prison - looms when the chemist in a small village on the Corniche muddles up some rolls of film, and Vadassy finds himself accused of taking compromising photographs of French naval installations. While Kenton becomes a spy by mistake, Vadassy is mistaken for a spy. To clear his name, he has to work out which of his fellow guests at the Hôtel de la Réserve took the snaps. The precarious plight of stateless individuals - no less relevant a subject now than it was in the late 1930s - was of enduring interest to Ambler. Near the beginning of The Mask of Dimitrios, his most celebrated novel, he gives a terse account of the final weeks of the 1919-22 Greco-Turkish war and the sack of Smyrna (soon to become Izmir).

On the one hand: "Unable to destroy the Turkish army, the Greeks turned with frantic savagery to the business of destroying the Turkish population in the path of their flight." On the other: "For a fortnight, refugees from the oncoming Turks had been pouring into the city to swell the already large Greek and Armenian populations. They had thought that the Greek army would turn and defend Smyrna. But the Greek army had fled. Now they were caught in a trap. The holocaust began ... By the time that dawn broke on the 15th of September, over 120,000 persons had perished; but somewhere amidst that horror had been Dimitrios, alive." Sixteen years later, the corpse of Dimitrios Makropoulos, gangster, drug-runner, murderer, washes up in the Bosphorus with a stab wound to the stomach. Colonel Haki, a Turkish government official rumoured to be head of the secret police, shows the body to Charles Latimer, an English academic-turned-crime-writer wintering in Istanbul. Haki has devised the plot of an English country-house murder mystery.

He's pleased with the originality of the twist - the butler did it - but is too busy with the corpses of murdered Greek gangsters actually to write the novel, and so generously offers his notes to Latimer. Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography. So he sets off for Smyrna on the start of a "fantastic and slightly undignified wild goose chase", which soon proves life-threatening, too. Despite the consensus that The Mask of Dimitrios is "Ambler's finest novel", as the blurb on the back of the pulpy, now out-of-print Pan Classic Crime edition of 10 years ago put it, it is in some ways the least satisfactory of the prewar novels being reissued by Penguin. To an extent it's a victim of its own success: Greene admired it so much he borrowed substantially from it when he was writing the treatment for The Third Man.

To anyone who's seen Carol Reed's movie (or read Greene's novella), the discovery that Latimer makes in Paris halfway through The Mask of Dimitrios is about as surprising as the guilt of the butler in Colonel Haki's idea for a novel. And, for me at any rate, Latimer is the least engaging of Ambler's prewar protagonists: it's hard to have patience with a man who so wilfully gets himself into trouble. Kenton's and Vadassy's difficulties are a nice combination of bad judgment and bad luck; Latimer's a bit too much of a fool. Ambler resurrected - and finally disposed of - Latimer 30 years later in The Intercom Conspiracy, a novel about a reactionary propagandist smear-sheet based in Geneva, told as a postmodern collection of primary documents (letters, memos, transcribed dictation tapes and tape interviews) assembled by Latimer, with an explanatory foreword by "Eric Ambler": some names have been changed "to protect the guilty". Colonel Haki reappeared rather sooner, making a cameo appearance in Journey into Fear, which was published in 1940, and set during the first months of the war.

Graham is an engineer with the British armaments firm Cator & Bliss (a recurring and morally ambiguous entity in several of Ambler's novels), who has been carrying out research preliminary to rearming the Turkish fleet. An attempt is made on his life in his hotel in Istanbul: he's carrying vital classified information in his head; if he were killed, the rearmament would be delayed, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Colonel Haki sends him back to London secretly by ship instead of on the train. But one of the other passengers is working for the Nazis. Graham wasn't the first of Ambler's protagonists to be trained, as Ambler was, as an engineer. In Cause for Alarm, Nicholas Marlow loses his job on the day he proposes to his girlfriend. After several weeks of trying to find new employment, he accepts, not without misgivings, and with the disapproval of a socialist friend, a position in the Milan office of a British firm which manufactures machines that make artillery shells. No sooner does he arrive in Italy than he is approached by various spies of uncertain affiliation (including one Andreas Zaleshoff), all eager for information about how the fascist government is arming itself.

Marlow, whose predecessor was not only involved in espionage but murdered, at first wants nothing to do with these people, but a roughing up at the hands of fascist thugs changes his mind. Caught up in a tangle of espionage and counter-espionage, he eventually falls foul of the authorities. Trapped on the wrong side of a continent rolling towards war, with a price on his head, he has to flee. The last third of the novel is taken up by an impressively sustained and exhilarating chase across northern Italy. Marlow learns the hard way that personal, business and political loyalties are often in conflict with each other, and that sometimes there is no way of making a straightforwardly right choice. Not long after finishing Journey into Fear Ambler stopped writing novels and joined the army. ("But is there anything you can actually do?" the recruiting officer asked him after learning that he wrote novels for a living.) He was eventually drafted into the army film unit, writing the script for The Way Ahead (1944), directed by Carol Reed and starring David Niven.

Then he went to Italy with a US signal corps film unit, shooting propaganda movies with John Huston: he got drunk with Humphrey Bogart in Naples, and came under fire from enemy bombers in the shit-strewn ruins of San Pietro, a village abandoned by the retreating German army. When the war was over, he got a job in the movies, working as a scriptwriter and producer for Ealing Studios and J Arthur Rank - his credits include The Cruel Sea (1953), adapted from Nicholas Monsarrat's novel, and A Night to Remember (1958), starring Kenneth More as second officer on the Titanic - and later moving to Hollywood. He was one of the many uncredited writers who worked at one time or another on the script for the Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty (right). In 1958 he had divorced his first wife, Louise Crombie, an American fashion journalist he'd met in Paris in the late 1930s, and married Joan Harrison, who co-wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hithcock's Rebecca (1940) and produced more than 200 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Hitchcock, who organised the wedding, was surely conscious of the debt that movies such as North by Northwest (1959) owed to Ambler's fiction. In the dozen thrillers Ambler wrote between the 1950s and the 80s there is a falling off of interest in the leftish political themes of his earlier books, as he becomes ever more intrigued by the shady, unsavoury characters whom he would once have cast as villains - an outstanding example is Paul Firman, the narrator of Send No More Roses (1977). Ambler's last novel, The Care of Time (1981), is about a career criminal who's decided to retire; the parallels with Ambler's own career as a writer hardly need spelling out. Two further books were published between then and his death in 1998: the autobiography and a collection of stories, Short Not Sweet: Stories So Far. The retreat from political engagement is a symptom of a drift to the right.

Looking back on his youthful radicalism in Here Lies, Ambler wrote: "If the term fellow-travellers had been used in its present pejorative sense at the time I think that many of us could well have been described in that way." The tone of regret is disappointing - what does he have to apologise for? - but hardly surprising in a memoir written both at and in a more conservative age (Ambler was by then living in tax exile in Switzerland). The first novel he wrote after the second world war, Judgment on Deltchev (1951), about a Stalinist show trial in eastern Europe, provoked a flurry of hostile responses from former comrades. He received angry letters accusing him of being "a traitor in the class-war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat's paw". But some of those who were outraged by his treachery must have been among those who left the Communist party of Great Britain in droves five years later, after the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. By the late 50s, deep into the cold war, the story of a British or American innocent abroad stumbling into trouble was an increasingly difficult one for an intelligent writer to tell.

Passage of Arms (1959) was the last of Ambler's books about a naive, good-hearted man getting out of his depth by doing the wrong thing with good intentions. Greg Nilsen is a middle-aged engineer with his own die-casting business in Wilmington, Delaware. On a cruise around the Far East with his wife, he gets involved in a spot of gun-running. Structurally speaking, the protagonist of the book isn't Nilsen so much as the arms cache, which the narrative follows from its discovery in the Malaysian jungle by a young man who works on a rubber plantation but who wants to run a bus company, and to whom the guns are nothing more than an unexpected source of the necessary capital, to its delivery to irregulars fighting communists in Indonesia. The passage of time has brought an extra level of irony to the novel, which Ambler can't have foreseen but surely wouldn't have been surprised by. Nilsen thinks he's being patriotic by helping the anti-communist cause. Confident in his opposition to what they're fighting against, he doesn't worry too much about what the people he's arming are fighting for. The phrase "Islamic extremism" wouldn't have been in his vocabulary.

• Journey into Fear, Uncommon Danger, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy are all published by Penguin Modern Classics at £8.99 each. To order copies for £8.99 each, with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to the Guardian bookshop Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Mask of Dimitrios The Mask of Dimitrios 4.2 out of 5 stars 190 One person found this helpful 5.0 out of 5 starsStill great after all these years ByMal Warwickon July 1, 2015 First published in 1939, A Coffin for Dimitrios is widely regarded as one of the best spy novels ever written. That reputation is richly deserved. But it would be a mistake to pigeonhole what may be Eric Ambler’s most accomplished work as merely an espionage novel, as it features few of the familiar devices of that genre — which may be why it’s so highly regarded.

However, A Coffin for Dimitrios can be best seen as an historical novel that depicts Europe between the two World Wars, and does so masterfully. The novel is structured as an account of a wide-ranging investigation into the life and death of a notorious international criminal named Dimitrios Makropoulos. After surviving one of the gruesome massacres of Armenians and Greeks undertaken by Kemal Ataturk, the legendary founder of modern Turkey, Makropoulos is said to have participated in assassination plots in at least two countries, engaged in espionage as a freelance agent, and murdered several men. The unlikely investigator is Charles Latimer, “a lecturer in political economy at a minor English university” who has left behind the academic life and become a successful author of formulaic detective novels. In Istanbul on a trip to research a forthcoming novel, Latimer stumbles across the head of the Turkish secret police at a party. The two hit it off, and the policeman, apparently showing off to an author he admires, introduces the novelist to the secret Turkish files on Makropoulos. He even takes him to view the man’s body in the morgue.

Out of fascination with the criminal’s remarkable story and caught up now in an obsession, Latimer halts work on a novel and sets out to investigate Makropoulos’ life, traveling from Turkey to Greece, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and France as clues turn up in unlikely places. As Latimer’s obsessive quest proceeds, his views of Makropoulos become more nuanced. To the novelist, “it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite [developed in the US following World War I] and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.” To judge from both the histories and the literature of the era, this sentiment aptly reflects the pessimism pervading Europe during in the 1920s and 30s. For anyone who fancies historical fiction, detective fiction, or espionage novels, A Coffin for Dimitrios will be a delight.

3.0 out of 5 starsThe Mask of Dimitrios ByCpheon August 8, 2016 Went into this mystery/thriller with certain expectations. I did enjoy the period and the setting of the novel but I did have an inkling early on how the mystery/thriller component would turn out. There weren't a lot of surprises in store. My favourite characters were the sleazy Peters and Colonel Haki whose presence was quite minute unfortunately. Charles Latimer was a likeable enough main character but his presence was often overshadowed by the other characters. Format: Kindle Edition | Verified Purchase First published in 1939, A Coffin for Dimitrios is widely regarded as one of the best spy novels ever written. That reputation is richly deserved. But it would be a mistake to pigeonhole what may be Eric Ambler’s most accomplished work as merely an espionage novel, as it features few of the familiar devices of that genre — which may be why it’s so highly regarded. However, A Coffin for Dimitrios can be best seen as an historical novel that depicts Europe between the two World Wars, and does so masterfully.

The novel is structured as an account of a wide-ranging investigation into the life and death of a notorious international criminal named Dimitrios Makropoulos. After surviving one of the gruesome massacres of Armenians and Greeks undertaken by Kemal Ataturk, the legendary founder of modern Turkey, Makropoulos is said to have participated in assassination plots in at least two countries, engaged in espionage as a freelance agent, and murdered several men. The unlikely investigator is Charles Latimer, “a lecturer in political economy at a minor English university” who has left behind the academic life and become a successful author of formulaic detective novels. In Istanbul on a trip to research a forthcoming novel, Latimer stumbles across the head of the Turkish secret police at a party. The two hit it off, and the policeman, apparently showing off to an author he admires, introduces the novelist to the secret Turkish files on Makropoulos. He even takes him to view the man’s body in the morgue.

Out of fascination with the criminal’s remarkable story and caught up now in an obsession, Latimer halts work on a novel and sets out to investigate Makropoulos’ life, traveling from Turkey to Greece, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and France as clues turn up in unlikely places. As Latimer’s obsessive quest proceeds, his views of Makropoulos become more nuanced. To the novelist, “it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite [developed in the US following World War I] and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.” To judge from both the histories and the literature of the era, this sentiment aptly reflects the pessimism pervading Europe during in the 1920s and 30s. For anyone who fancies historical fiction, detective fiction, or espionage novels, A Coffin for Dimitrios will be a delight. 0Comment | One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes No Report abuse Comment Format: Kindle Edition | Verified Purchase Dmitrios is only seen in person at the end, but the whole tale is about his criminal and espionage swathe cut through Europe from 1919 to immediately post WW 2. He was thief, drug ring capo, spy, capitalist entrepreneur, man of many faces. The narrator is a British historian turned thriller writer, run dry of creative ideas for the moment, who hears of this mysterious Dmitrios and sets out to follow his trail -- through the Balkans, a presidential assassination plot, Greek intelligence, Turkish police, French co-conspirators and cooperators and a retired German spy who used Dmitrios. Small spoiler: the "coffin" for Dmitrios was the way he smuggled heroin and cocaine into Western Europe from the East. The British author almost dies (sic) of curiosity, but in the end Dmitrios and a co-conspirator kill each other. Format: Paperback | Verified Purchase What a strange and improbable book. It is difficult to characterize as either a mystery or spy thriller. Or is it a profound meditation on the nature of evil in a terrible time.

Mostly set in the Balkans in the inter-war period, its author tells a complex tale of murder, double crossing and sets it against a period of immense strife. Normally I do not read mystery novels but there was a mention of this work by Mark Mazower whose historical writings are some of the most brilliant that I have ever read, hence the decision to purchase THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS. Eric Ambler its author never travelled to the Balkans according to Mazower who wrote the brief introduction but the work is imbued with the seedy sense of those countries during a period of intense political upheaval. It is a novel/mystery/thriller that must be read carefully and with attention. The reader will be rewarded with a portrait of a decadent society on the verge of collapse forever caught through the words of this author. Format: Paperback | Verified Purchase Author Eric Ambler thrilled an earlier generation of readers with his espionage and crime novels and screenplays. His work has held up remarkably well as a reading experience. "A Coffin for Dimitrios" is generally considered one of his best, first published in 1939.

It is the story of an Englishman named Latimer, a writer of crime fiction who becomes involved in the pursuit of a real Greek criminal named Dimitrios. The setting of the novel, in a tumultuous Europe between the World Wars, is now a bit dated, but Ambler's brisk prose and flair for interesting characters and intrigue should carry the modern reader through the twisting and turning plot, as Latimer follows a thin trail of clues to a surprising discovery and to an understanding of his target. The settings of the novel, in Turkey, Eastern Europe, and France, sound authentic and add to the flavor of an exotic story. Ambler is generally considered to have laid the groundwork for later writers such as LeCarre, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum. Recommended. Format: Paperback | Verified Purchase This is an engaging spy novel. The protagonist is Charles Lattimer, a mild-mannered English mystery writer. He’s drawn into the investigation of the life of Dimitrios, a recently deceased criminal. His own curiosity is the force that draws him in and, as he goes from city to city to get closer to the truth, we are drawn into the story along with him.

It’s the ordinariness of the protagonist that makes the novel work so well, but it’s the fascinating and well-drawn supporting characters that truly make this novel shine. It’s not the type of book that is thrilling or impossible to put down (there is remarkably little action, given how the genre would subsequently develop), but it is always interesting. Format: Kindle Edition | Verified Purchase Inspired by a comment by author Alan Furst that this was one of his favorite novels, I decided that I had to read it. And what a read it is! There's enough twists and turns to make you dizzy. I figured out the first surprise, missed the second completely, was partly right on the third, but never expected the fourth. And there are others I'm sure I missed. Europe between the World Wars, murders, blackmail, drugs, white slavery, spies, moral rectitude... Eric Ambler worked them all into this book that has turned me into one of his fans, I won't be happy until I've read more. And it they're all as good - or only half as good - as "A Coffin for Dimitrios" - I'll be very satisfied, Read it and see why.

Format: Hardcover | Verified Purchase For the sake of accuracy, the version of the book under review is the 1976 hardback reprint (by American Reprint Co.) of an Alfred A. Knopf edition, presumably the one copyright 1943, of A Coffin for Dimitrios. There is no dust cover; the hardback cover contains only the title and the author's name on a plain, light-grey binding. It is a well-made, though modest volume: serviceable but no collector's item. There are many excellent reviews on Amazon of this outstanding early spy novel in a paperback version. Please read them to enjoy much literate and amusing opinion about it. Suffice it to say that I, like the others, thoroughly enjoyed it. I reveled in the very correct demeanor, but delightfully ironic language, of the narrator, who tells the story of Latimer (note play on "Ambler"), an obscure professor at a minor English university turned writer of detective stories, "...

one of the shamefaced few who could make money at the sport." One occasionally emerges from following along into the accelerating gyre into which Latimer allows himself to be led, stopping while coming up for air to reflect on what great sport the author is having with the reader, leading one into ever more improbable, but thoroughly absorbing adventures. What a tour de force, that he can carry off this wild and exuberant trail of strange encounters, yet maintain his very British sang froid. One certainly wonders why seek, at such peril, for Dimitrios, who takes ever more formidable shape, despite being dead, apparently, almost from the outset. The author nails together the coffin, plank by plank, but who will wind up in it? 0Comment | One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse Comment Eric Ambler, 89, a pioneering author of modern thrillers... - tribunedigital-baltimoresun Eric Ambler, 89, a pioneering author of modern thrillers... Deaths Elsewhere October 24, 1998 Eric Ambler, 89, a pioneering author of modern thrillers and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, died Thursday at his London apartment.

Among the best-known of his 21 published books are "Epitaph for a Spy" in 1938, "The Mask of Dimitrios" in 1939, "Journey into Fear" in 1940, and "The Schirmer Inheritance" in 1953. "He took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets of Istanbul and where it all really happened," said Frederick Forsyth, author of "The Day of the Jackal." Collins Seitz, 94, former chief justice of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and the first judge in the nation to order an all-white school to admit blacks, died Friday in Delaware. A 1952 case heard by Seitz, then on Delaware's Chancery Court, was one of the four that the Supreme Court combined into Brown vs. Board of Education. His work was quoted by Chief Justice Earl Warren when the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954. Albert A.

Hutler, 89, whose book "Agony of Survival," about his work in 1945 with Holocaust survivors, won accolades from readers and Jewish scholars, died in San Diego Sunday of complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was chief of the Displaced Persons Section of the 7th Army Military Government unit in Germany. Burton Cross, 95, a former Republican governor of Maine who emphasized fiscal conservatism, died Thursday in Augusta. He was elected governor in 1952 but lost his re-election bid two years later to Edmund Muskie. Francis W. Sargent,83, a Republican who won a reputation as an environmental activist while he was governor of Massachusetts from 1969 to 1975 -- when he was defeated by Democrat Michael S. Dukakis -- died Thursday at his home in Dover, Mass. Charles I. Bennett Jr., 75, a retired Air Force major general whose career included an assignment as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal pilot, died Oct. 16 in Jacksonville, Fla. President Eisenhower later offered him the job of Air Force One pilot, which he declined. ZTC John L.

Sweeney, 70, a rail industry executive and appointee of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died of cancer Sunday in Jacksonville, Fla. He headed a planning commission under Mr. Kennedy that addressed economic problems in 13 Appalachian states and later helped develop Conrail. Arnold Auerbach, 86, a comedy writer for Milton Berle and Al Jolson, died Monday in New York. He contributed sketches to the Broadway revues "Call Me Mister" and "Inside USA." His books include "Funny Men Don't Laugh" (1965), about his comedy writing for radio. Pub Date: 10/24/98 Amazon.in: Buy The Mask of Dimitrios (Progress English) Book Online at Low Prices in India | The Mask of Dimitrios (Progress English) Reviews & Ratings By A Customer on 21 December 2016 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase Stories like this are not written anymore ! Just not possible to write them I suppose because of the changed world we live in now. "A Coffin for Dimitrios" is the story of a manhunt with a difference. The infamous Dimitrios Makopoulous is a criminal of the worst order.

He has everything from theft to murder in his list of accomplishments. But sinister as he is, it is impossible to catch him. Then suddenly he turns up - dead. Accidentally, a thriller writer is intrigued by his case history and decides to look him up by visiting the places and people connected with Dimitrios. He finds something he never expected to find. To reveal more would not be fair to new readers. It is not a very long story and can be finished in a few hours time. But it is also a story which makes me want to read again and again. This is due to writing style of the master - Eric Ambler. The atmosphere he creates and the feel of a world which will never be seen again is truly captivating. Life was simple then but also more pleasurable. Extremely recommended and guaranteed to become a treasured possession in your thriller library. Eric Ambler Biography from Biogs.com England clear Eric Ambler was born on 28 June 1909 in London and died there aged 89, on 23 October, 1998. The novelist and critic Anthony Burgess coined the word, 'Amblerian', to describe Ambler's qualities.

Among the best-known of Ambler's 21 published books are 'Epitaph for a Spy' in 1938, 'The Mask of Dimitrios' in 1939, 'Journey into Fear' in 1940, and 'Topkapi' in 1962. Eric Ambler also wrote an autobiography, 'Here Lies' in 1985. The New York Times's obituary of Ambler by Eric Pace, explains Ambler's genesis as a thriller writer: " ... Young Eric went to Colfe's Grammar School in London, studied engineering at London University, found it dull and left in 1927 without a degree. Then came a stint with an electrical-equipment company, a disappointing stab at show business, early, nonlucrative writing of fiction and plays, and some years in advertising, where he began as a copywriter and did well before turning full time to the writing of thrillers. "When Mr. Ambler was still a London advertising man in 1934 he had an odd formative experience.

While on vacation in Marseilles, he was cheated out of money playing poker dice with a larcenous bartender and then fantasized about murdering the man with a rifle at a street crossing in the city. At that same spot, later that year, a Croatian assassin shot and killed King Alexander of Yugoslavia. "That coincidence spurred Mr. Ambler's imagination. In an interview half a century later, he recalled: 'I felt I had a fresh bit of my character, which was an assassin. And I felt there were people all over Europe just like me, just ready for the word to kill.'

Question: Which author who died in 1998 wrote the thrillers 'The Mask of Dimitrios' and 'Journey into Fear'?
Answer: Eric Ambler